William of Moerbeke

William of Moerbeke, French Guillaume de Moerbeke, (born c. 1215, Moerbeke, Brabant—died c. 1286, Orvieto?), Flemish cleric, archbishop, and classical scholar whose Latin translations of the works of Aristotle and other early Greek philosophers and commentators were important in the transmission of Greek thought to the medieval Latin West.

William entered the Dominican priory at Ghent and later studied in Paris and Cologne, where he presumably worked with Albertus Magnus. After an assignment c. 1260 to the priory in Thebes, and in Nicaea, near Constantinople, he was appointed chaplain and confessor to Pope Clement IV (1265–68) and to five succeeding popes. A proponent of reunion between the Eastern and Western churches, William took part in the Council of Lyon (1274) as an adviser to Pope Gregory X. On April 9, 1278, Pope Nicholas III named him archbishop of Corinth, a position he held until his death. The neighbouring Greek village of Merbakas is thought to be named for him. The place of William’s death is uncertain; he is known to have traveled to the Italian states in the mid-1280s at the behest of the pope.

At the urging of Thomas Aquinas, whom he knew at the Italian Dominican houses at Viterbo and Orvieto, William in 1260 made a literal Latin translation of Aristotle’s On the Heavens and Meteorology. During the next two decades he translated parts of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Politics, Rhetoric, and History of Animals, together with cognate treatises on animal psychology and physiology, concluding in 1278 with Poetics. He revised existing Latin versions of other Aristotelian writings, including On Memory and Recall, Physics, Posterior Analytics, and possibly the Nichomachean Ethics.

The more important early commentaries on Aristotle’s works that William also translated include those by Alexander of Aphrodisia (2nd century) on Metaphysica and De sensu (On Sensation), Ammonius Hermiae (5th century) on Peri hermeneias (“On Interpretation”), and those by Themistius (4th century) and John Philoponus (6th century) on De anima (On the Soul). Most of these translations were done in 1268.

William’s translations of such leading early Neoplatonist writers as the 5th-century philosopher Proclus’sElementatio theologica (Elements of Theology), as well as his commentary on Plato’s Timaeus, revealed to 13th-century Scholastic philosophers and theologians the Platonic basis of treatises formerly and incorrectly attributed to Aristotle. The discovery of this literature by Western philosophers also gave great impetus to Neoplatonism in the Middle Ages. Using a rigidly literal style, William rendered the Greek texts into Latin with a fidelity that not only helped his contemporaries grasp Aristotle’s exact meaning but also established his translations as the standard for the medieval Latin world.

Other classical Greek texts that William translated include works of Ptolemy and Hippocrates’ De prognosticationibus aegritudinum secundum motum lunae (On Predicting Illnesses According to the Phases of the Moon).